Topic awaiting preservation: Deleting selected

Ok, I've been working on having this control room of mine be able to delete all entrys that are selected (via checkbox). I've finaly got something that works but I'm not 100% sure why it works, and if there is anything wrong with it.

A form containing:

<input type="checkbox" name="deleted_items[]" "value="' . $id . '" />

Is submitted to:

if ($_POST["deleted_items"])
	{
		$deleted_items = join(', ', $_POST["deleted_items"]);
		$query = "DELETE FROM newsTable WHERE id IN ($deleted_items)";
		$result = mysql_query($query);
	}

I guess where I'm most confused is on the input name... how does the HTML name know that is an array? Sorry to be such a pain, if I don't know exactly what every line of code is doing I have trouble sleeping. I can't find the tutorial that lead me to this but I will keep searching and post it if I do.

Your HTML doesn't know.
Your PHP does, because of the '[]' attached to the end of the name. Because the brackets are empty, the array keys are set to the default (0,1,2...).

Ah, so how come in

$_POST["deleted_items"]

the brackets are not used?

quote:

---

redroy said:

$_POST["deleted_items"]

---

They are - $_POST [ "deleted_items" ]

=)

The brackets are empty in your HTML because they need to be filled in by the sequential numbers that are automatically inserted by the server side code. In your $POST[] example, you are designating the specific value you are looking for, ie 'deleted_items' which is a key in the $_POST[] array.



(Edited by DL-44 on 01-24-2006 05:26)

Oh man... I guess I need to read up on $_POST[] and arrays. I really haven't done anything that uses arrays so they confuse me just a bit. Thanks for all your help DL... you've been awesome.